James the Just

Who Was James the Just?

James the Just was the brother of Jesus of Nazareth, the leader of the Jerusalem church in the decades following the crucifixion, and the author of the New Testament letter that bears his name — one of the most practically oriented and most theologically misread texts in the Christian canon. He was known in the early church as “the Just” or “the Righteous” for his reputation for prayer and moral seriousness; the church historian Eusebius reports that he spent so much time in prayer that his knees became calloused like a camel’s.

He was not a follower of Jesus during the ministry — the Gospels record that Jesus’s brothers did not believe in him — but the risen Christ appeared to James specifically (1 Corinthians 15:7), an encounter that transformed him into one of the pillars of the Jerusalem church and an eyewitness to the resurrection. He presided over the Jerusalem Council of Acts 15, which settled the question of Gentile inclusion in the church, and he was stoned to death by order of the high priest Ananus in AD 62, in the period between the death of the Roman governor Festus and the arrival of his successor.

His letter is significant for TLA because it is the most direct biblical statement of the relationship between faith and action — between the interior life of belief and the exterior life of practice that belief should produce. Luther famously called it an “epistle of straw,” but his judgment was based on a misreading that the subsequent tradition has largely corrected.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• The Letter of James — c. AD 48–62 — New Testament epistle